A global compendium of weeds by R.P. (Rod) Randall Published in 2002 by RG and FJ Richardson, hard cover, 906 pages Price $A165.00, plus $A12 postage within Australia [up to 3 kg], overseas postage please request a quote ISBN 0 9587439 83 or ISBN 9780958743983

Predicting which plants will become weeds is difficult, with the single most important indicator of a species' weed potential, over all other attributes, being a documented weedy history.

Until now, the most comprehensive coverage of the world's weed flora was produced in 1979 by Holm et al. (A Geographic Atlas of World Weeds) and listed 6400 species. In this compendium, Rod Randall has compiled a list of almost 21,000 entries comprising over 18,000 weedy taxa and 2500 alternate name records - it represents a huge increase in the number of documented weed species globally. The information presented is specifically designed to give a weed risk assessor, or anyone interested in the weed potential of a plant, a condensed report of the status of a species with, most importantly, further avenues for finding more information through the extensive reference listing.

Each record comprises:

• Genus, Species, Author
• Family
• Alternate names
• Common names: including French, German, Finnish, Italian, Japanese (phonetic), Portuguese and Spanish
• Status: Weed, Sleeper, Quarantine Weed, Noxious Weed, Naturalised, Native Weed, Introduced, Garden Escape, Environmental Weed, Cultivation Escape and Casual Alien
• Source Codes: References cited
• Life Form
• Arid/Aqua - a basic measure of a plant's ability to survive
• Cultivated or Promoted
• Herbal
• Toxic
• Origin

The compendium commences with an introduction on how best to use it, and ends with a comprehensive index containing more than 15,000 alternate scientific names and 27,000 common names in numerous languages. A sample page is available as a PDF file.

While people continue to move plants around the world with little regard for the consequences of their actions, new weeds will continue to appear.

The procudtion of this book has been supported by the CRC for Australian Weed Management, Department of Agriculture Western Australia, United States Geplogical Survey, Missouri Botanic Garden Press and North Carolina Botanical Garden of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.